Turns Out the Bones and Sleepy Hollow Crossover Wasn’t As Strange As We …

Raise your hand if you went into the and crossover episodes incredibly confused as to how they would make any sense whatsoever! We’ve arrived at part two of the Bones/Sleepy Hollow crossover (read our recap of part one here), otherwise known as the event that would definitely be my Ascension if I were the Mayor of Sunnydale.Intersecting a paranormal cop drama with a scientific procedural seems like a crazy idea, but the executive producers and teams behind Sleepy Hollow and Bones found a way to make it work during Thursday’s Halloween crossover event. Sleepy Hollow, meanwhile, has built its deep mythology on a foundation of history studded with supernatural baddies who aren’t always easily defeated with bullets. But, truthfully, the shows both have the same fun, playful tone, so it wasn’t too jarring to see the Jeffersonian crew on the Sleepy Hollow turf and vice versa.

Howe, who died during the American Revolution, unites the two casts as the Bones team tries to figure out how a modern-day med student ended up next to the general’s corpse and Sleepy Hollow’s Ichabod (Tom Mison) and Abbie (Nicole Beharie) need the skeleton to find the key to Pandora’s (Shannyn Sossamon) reason for being in town. On the FBI side, Abbie Mills (Nicole Beharie) and Booth (David Boreanaz) form a bond when Booth realizes that newly-minted FBI agent Abbie has more than a few qualities that remind him of his younger self. Here, Bones showrunner Jonathan Collier and Sleepy Hollow executive producer Clifton Campbell talk with The Hollywood Reporter about what happens next after the crossover. Barring all heat- and chemistry-related logic, the most unbelievable science on Bones meets Sleepy Hollow at the height of supernatural madness, and it works.

At least until the pair realizes they have more common ground than they initially believed, Bones executive producer Jonathan Collier explains. “He’s an educated man from another century who probably would be more like Brennan than not, if he would’ve been born in our time,” he told reporters earlier this week. And despite appearances, these shows aren’t actually opposites, in that each hinges on the partnership of two people who aren’t really opposites, either.

It’s fitting that this event was touted with an X-Files analogy, with Bones as the Scully to Sleepy Hollow’s Mulder, because even Scully has a cross necklace (that’s Booth), and even Mulder has his doubts (that would be Abbie). During the invasion of Manhattan, Washington sent Crane to kill his former commander: no small ask, since Crane takes the bond of a “lef-tenant” seriously.

At a certain point he sold his soul to the devil and became part of a darker mythology on our show and it was important for that character to reveal that side of him in the way that we do in our hour so Crane can really confront that demon. Anyway, to quote Booth, “It’s Halloween — all bets are off.” For Brennan, Halloween means bickering over candy, talking smack about the other moms in Christine’s class for their “completely unrealistic” plastic eyeballs, and pranking Booth into believing that he’s eaten an actual brain.

After mistakenly assuming the coworkers-turned-friends were actually coworkers-turned-sexual partners like she and Booth, she encouraged Ichabod to get it on with his now-roommate. “I suggest you consider it,” she matter-of-factly stated. Her world opens up a bit more and we find out that a lot of this has to do with a tablet that was revealed between seasons two and three that really open up the mythology for our show.

The general swore the oath of the draugour, signing up to be a soldier even beyond the grave, and now that he’s back, he’s bringing his old army back with him. I’m already so deep in the crossover mindset that this surprises me, but the Jeffersonian doesn’t view the 18th-century body as a fresh case deserving immediate attention. Abbie and Crane get a call that Howe’s corpse never arrived from the Jeffersonian, and since Temperance Brennan isn’t one to mess up paperwork, they suspect foul play. “Foul play” and “Pandora” are pretty much synonyms. It’s material evidence, so it’s everything to Brennan, and you’ll have to pry it away from her cold dead hands, but it isn’t, on its own, a case — just a lead that might help them solve another one.

The car that Pandora ran off the road isn’t far from the mausoleum, which is how the Witnesses find themselves in an old cemetery on Halloween morning, a dead body on one side and a whole army of the undead coming at them on the other. The more timely dead body belongs to Sarah Lippman, a third-year medical student who recently shook up her entire look, going from pink hair to blond and trading eyebrow piercings for manicures. Even bullets can’t stop the draugour (“Isn’t that great?”), but sunlight can — the soldiers disappear beneath the dirt at the first sign of daylight. Her boyfriend, Joel, says that he was just “starting to rub off on her” — which is a weird thing to say, because happiness and personal style aren’t actually related.

The answer to defeat the soldiers lies in Howe’s “primal tomb,” which suggests that his body wasn’t always in the church where the college kids found it. Crane and Abbie think the body might belong to Abraham Van Brunt (a.k.a. the Headless Horseman, a.k.a. the Apocalyptic Horseman of Death), but it’s actually General William Howe, a famously cruel commander of the British forces. There is one way to find his original resting place — Abbie shot off a bone in Howe’s hand, and who better to trace the history of a bone than Dr. The more you think about it, the connective tissue of [Abbie] being a federal agent and then becoming an FBI agent this season makes it much more doable.

The Witnesses take a road trip back to D.C. to issue a challenge to their “new friends at the Jeffersonian.” (What a phrase.) While Brennan reads the bones, Booth reads Abbie. Whether that’s the Horseman’s skull or Howe’s, there’s no one better to investigate than the two capital-W Witnesses in the fight against the apocalypse. Crane heads to the Jeffersonian’s archives to learn more (it’s “like archive city,” so he’s living the dream) while Abbie teams up with Booth for some old-school detective work.

Campbell: What I found in Jon’s answer that would one day, hopefully, be fun to explore again is in the final moment when Crane brings something to her because [they] need to bring the body back to Sleepy Hollow — she doesn’t concede her point of view. Going full-on National Treasure is Sleepy Hollow’s common ground with Bones — it’s where Booth’s rogue, leather jacket-wearing patriotism and Brennan’s love of historical artifacts meet Crane and Abbie’s vigilantism in underground tunnels. “A basement is never just a basement with the Masons,” Abbie sighs, world weary already, as Crane slides his ring into a notch on the wall and turns it. Crane thinks it’s Greek fire, legendary for being inextinguishable; Brennan thinks it’s napalm; Booth just thinks he needs to get his wife out of there. Booth and Abbie comb through Sarah’s apartment and find everything she’d need to dig up Howe’s skull, along with a note about how “incredible” last night was.

Two weeks before her death, Sarah went out for an expensive night of drinks with a classmate, but she wasn’t cheating on her boyfriend — she was celebrating coming back from the dead. I don’t recall how long it took themselves to realize that internally in the show, but it seems to me 10 seasons later that it’s worked out pretty well. [The line] is just a look into the potential future of this show in terms of their relationship. There’s a tooth missing, which Crane says would have been porcelain, and if the killer didn’t know to look for it, it might not have been cleaned.

It’s happened before, as Crane recalls in this week’s Obligatory Betsy Ross Tie-In: Betsy led Patriot refugees out of Manhattan through a system of hidden tunnels, then returned to burn Howe’s original troops. Campbell: Having done shows like this before, you don’t know when you’re starting out what timeline is the right one for a relationship like this. The slow burn is actually the one that people, despite the fact they want it to happen now, is the one that’s much more satisfying over the long haul.

Back in Sleepy Hollow, Jenny and Joe prepare some Greek fire, and the Witnesses hit the streets, interrupting the soldiers’ demonstration before it can turn deadly. The Jeffersonian is taking Washington’s tomb under its jurisdiction, and Brennan wants Crane to help with the excavation, but he’s a bit busy fighting for his archives at the moment. Joe is so desperate to find out Nevins’ connection to his father that he offers Foster the Shard in exchange for a meeting with the man himself, which doesn’t look good to Daniel.